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An extended context-free grammar (or regular right part grammar) is one in which the right-hand side of the production rules is allowed to be a regular expression over the grammar's terminals and nonterminals. Extended context-free grammars describe exactly the context-free languages.
In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is in Greibach normal form (GNF) if the right-hand sides of all production rules start with a terminal symbol, optionally followed by some variables. A non-strict form allows one exception to this format restriction for allowing the empty word (epsilon, ε) to be a member of the described language.
Determining if a context-free grammar generates all possible strings, or if it is ambiguous. Given two context-free grammars, determining whether they generate the same set of strings, or whether one generates a subset of the strings generated by the other, or whether there is any string at all that both generate.
To convert a grammar to Chomsky normal form, a sequence of simple transformations is applied in a certain order; this is described in most textbooks on automata theory. [4]: 87–94 [5] [6] [7] The presentation here follows Hopcroft, Ullman (1979), but is adapted to use the transformation names from Lange, Leiß (2009).
Deterministic context-free grammars were particularly useful because they could be parsed sequentially by a deterministic pushdown automaton, which was a requirement due to computer memory constraints. [4] In 1965, Donald Knuth invented the LR(k) parser and proved that there exists an LR(k) grammar for every deterministic context-free language. [5]
A parse tree or parsing tree [1] (also known as a derivation tree or concrete syntax tree) is an ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar. The term parse tree itself is used primarily in computational linguistics; in theoretical syntax, the term syntax tree is more common.
A weighted context-free grammar (WCFG) is a more general category of context-free grammar, where each production has a numeric weight associated with it. The weight of a specific parse tree in a WCFG is the product [7] (or sum [8]) of all rule weights in the tree. Each rule weight is included as often as the rule is used in the tree.
The pumping lemma for context-free languages (called just "the pumping lemma" for the rest of this article) describes a property that all context-free languages are guaranteed to have. The property is a property of all strings in the language that are of length at least p {\displaystyle p} , where p {\displaystyle p} is a constant—called the ...